We examine the role of utility models (UM) in patent filing strategies. With an extensive patent family data from European countries, we explore the structures and characteristics of patent families, which include UMs. A simple typology of patent families with UM members is introduced. We document that the geographical scope of most patent families with UM members is purely national, which is in line with the conventional view that the UM mechanism covers technologically and economically marginal inventions. However, the image of a UM as a signal of a minor invention is an oversimplification. Applicants exhibit a mixture of uses for the UM and there exists a subset of UM filings linked to inventions the inventive step of which meets or exceeds the threshold required for patent protection. Some UMs are members of international patent families, indicating that applicants may have some strategic motives to use UMs in international filing. The findings highlight that both types of IPR documents (UMs and patents) should be taken into account when working with data on patent families, analysing patent filing strategies, and constructing patent-based indicators such as patenting propensities.

Urban agglomeration is an important correlate to regional innovation. Large population centers pool knowledge workers and facilitate spillovers essential to innovative activity. And large populations provide more cost-effective locations for non-labor inputs to innovation, including local infrastructure that may facilitate innovative activity. However, university locations may also agglomerate these innovative inputs, even absent the agglomerative effects of large populations. Regional policymakers may find it useful to differentiate between various correlates to innovation. This paper exploits the collinearity of universities and population with regional human capital to apportion the relationship between these regional correlates of innovation into human-capital related and non-human-capital related channels. We identify a correlation between universities and regional innovation that reflects a relationship between innovation and regional human capital correlated with university presence. None of this relationship can be apportioned to factors correlated with university presence and uncorrelated with local human capital. A key methodological contribution of this paper is the analytical framework, which can be extended to a larger number of aggregate factors and causal channels.

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